Farmer's Manual are one of the key bands when I think of the Austrian label
Mego. But for all that they haven't exactly released a lot of albums. Even
so they have been playing extensively live, which seems to be more of what
they are about. Many of the events of the last several years have been
recorded, and have been available on a website. At the time of this release
they had almost 4 days worth of live material, which using new DVD
technology they have managed to get on to one disc.

On hearing about this DVD with so much material on it I was unsure as to
what to expect. How on earth do you deal with 3 days and 21 hours and so
many minutes worth of live material? Being a DVD the DVD software kicks in
as soon as I put this disc in my computer. A little music plays and I expect
a menu to come up. Strangely it doesn't, instead we have some footage, where
the members of Farmer's Manual are sitting around a studio and then find a
dividing wall which they decide to break through. Okay, I watch this and do
other stuff, waiting for the menu, waiting for live stuff to come on. It
doesn't. The film finishes and that's that. Odd. Of course my next thought
is to look into the directory, which is where I find the meat of this
release. In basic terms the website that the material has been downloadable
from has been put into these folders. With which there are many external
links for you to explore further. But folder after folder of mp3s of live
material, photos, interviews, web pages. A fairly serious documentation of
who Farmer's Manual are and what they have been doing over the years.

Straight off there are downsides to this release. MP3 is a restrictive
format, limiting the listener to computer use - while some people have MP3
players they aren't that common, besides which the last time I was
experimenting with moving MP3s around on a Mego disc they were locked to
prevent that. Another thing is that, as with that previous Mego disc, the
web pages don't always load properly, I don't know if they have been
programmed for a different platform or not, but there are certainly issues.

However these are not necessarily a big deal. All of the material can be
accessed by just going into the folders as you would any other computer
file. With which there is a hell of a lot of material, and it will certainly
take me some time till I have worked through all of it - if I ever quite do
manage.

Working through the material it appears that some of the mp3s are either
very minimal, take a long while to build or complete silence. For now we
don't have the patience for those pieces - too much other material here to
worry about that. The material covers a range of electronic manipulations -
like when I saw Farmer's Manual perform, some of the material is willfully
difficult, other pieces are easier to appreciate. Reading the interviews
while listening helps, giving impressions of the way in which the trio
collect sounds and manipulate them ruthlessly to provide the end result. A
result which tends to be improvised, at least enough that each performance
is different. As they would need to be to make this release worth while in
the slightest. Many of the pieces are quite long, being live recordings as
they are, ranging from 30 minutes to considerably longer. I tend to find
that this means that I will listen to one piece in a session, in much the
same way as you would witness only one performance at a time. Though there
are some folders which feature several tracks, which allow for more lee way
if you are only looking to listen to a little bit at any one point.

Overall this release is pretty impressive. A real chance to explore the
music of this influential groups. Brought together in a strong package, one
disc with so much on it, in a DVD case that has all the dates detailed on
it, in a card slip sleeve which is covered with concert tickets, passes,
airplane slips and the like. A unique release.